How Much Advertising is too Much ?

Advertising is a great means of generating revenue from your blog. But whether you use AdSense, InfoLinks, Kontera or one of the other similar pay per click platforms or you even sell your own ad space, there’s a limit you should impose.

A blog with too much advertising on it is detrimental to your readers, your advertisers and you!

Excessive ads, particularly graphical ones, detract attention away from the content of the site, which is what your readers are interested in. If attention is deflected from the content, your readers aren’t getting what they came to your site for. Why, therefore, would they ever come back? This means you lose out on readers.

Advertisers suffer too. Take, as an example, an amazing blog about classic cars. Let’s say this blog has 1000 subscribers and a further couple of thousand daily readers. If this blog already has a clear layout, one ad on that site (providing the advertiser is in a related niche)is going to get attention. Two ads will get noticed and each has a reasonable chance of being clicked on. Put twenty on there, however, and not only does each of the advertisers have a far lower chance of being clicked on but your readers are also likely to be irritated by the over presence of material designed to try and get them to buy something.

But just where is the line? Is there a magic formula to this? No. There isn’t. How much advertising you can realistically use on your blog before it becomes too much depends on several factors. It depends on the type of advertising, location of the advertising and how it is located in relation to your content. Flashing banners ads, for example, are much more intrusive than the Adsense text ads. So where you can probably use 5 or even 6 text ads from Google in your side bar, six vertical blingy banners would be far, far too much.

Before deciding on how much advertising to use, consider how many posts you have too. A blog with three posts, for example, that is only updated once in a blue moon yet has thirty ads on it screams out to readers that it’s a blog specifically for revenue generation and not essentially about providing information to readers. If you have a new blog, advertising should be introduced slowly.

I suppose to key rule is that the focus of the blog should not be lost to advertising. Your readers read your blog because the content covers topics they are interested in. They don’t read your blog because they are looking for sponsored links by Google. And while most readers are perfectly understanding of the fact that bloggers putting time and effort into maintaining a site want to generate some sort of revenue, when advertising becomes the main focus, you lose the readers who are interested in content.

It’s a fine balancing act, that’s for sure. But if you’re not sure whether you have too much advertising or not, you can always ask for honest and brutal feedback from your readers.

Drop Your Comments And Questions Below.